December 20, 2001 Merry Christmas and a blessed New Year in Christ! For the second year in a row I didn't get my Christmas cards out before leaving for Milwaukee to visit my mother. I'm writing now from my laptop computer, sitting in Mom's living room enjoying the good smells of dinner cooking on the stove. A few minutes ago my sister Mary stopped by on her way to work -- evening shift at a local nursing home. It's great to be here with family, though no one else could make it to Milwaukee this year. You've probably already heard my big news for the year. I left my research position at the Compaq (formerly Digital) Systems Research Center in August, and started in product development at VMware right after Labor Day. VMware is a startup that has been going for about three years now, with about 170 employees and still staffing up. I'm one of about 20 Ph.D'.s on the staff. We are doing very well, even with the recent downturn in the computer industry. It's an excellent place for me, with lots of interesting, tough technical problems for me to work on and lots of good people to work with. It's not one of those startups where people are expected to work killer hours, but I've found myself working late just because there is so much to learn and so much to do. We had lots of changes at my church this year, too. Our long-time pastor Gerald Geiger took a call to serve as development director for the Lutheran high school in South Dakota. We were blessed to be assigned a new pastor from the seminary's graduating class, Johnold Strey. Considering the current shortage of pastors in the WELS, we are very grateful that we did not experience a long vacancy. We've all been very happy with Pastor Strey. He seems unusually seasoned and confident for a fresh graduate, and has come in with a good mix of new ideas to freshen things up and a respect for what we have been doing. He and his wife Emily are both very musical, which is a good fit for our congregation, and they are both full of energy and fun. We also have a new school principal and a new church secretary this year. So it's almost a complete new staff; only our lower-grade teacher and kindergarten teacher are the same. In March I bought a parakeet. He's very social; he likes to ride around on my shoulder, nibble my ear, and sample my breakfast cereal. My sister and I went shopping for him together during her visit, and she suggested his name (Chester). Some things are the same. As usual, I served as business manager and music leader for the one-week Tree of Life Lutheran Bible Camp this past summer. This year we had a pretty big group up front leading the singing: two guitars, keyboard on some songs, tambourine, and various singers. The other guitarist and the keyboard player had both been music majors in college, so I had to stay on my toes to keep up with them. They picked up all the songs I had brought in very quickly, and had some of their own to teach me. It was great fun. I also got to play for the WELS men's retreat again this year, and the pastor at Livermore had me come in to lead the music for their worship service in the park before their church picnic. I didn't do any traveling this year, other than to camp and now to Milwaukee for Christmas, but my mom and my sister both came to visit me earlier in the year, and we drove around to some of the sights in the SF Bay area. I used my two weeks of vacation between the end of my old job and the start of my new one to catch up on rest, set up my home computer to handle some the things I used to do at work, and catch up on some of the church work and other projects that I'd fallen behind on while trying to wrap everything up at my old job. (At the time I decided to quit, I had a couple of papers to finish writing about projects that I had invested too much time in to just let drop, so I was putting in long hours on that and let everything else go.) At Thanksgiving I was thinking about taking a short trip down the coast, but I ended up coming down with a bad cold right after Thanksgiving day. That ended that plan, and being ill for a couple of weeks also interfered a lot with Christmas preparations such as shopping, updating my address list, and sending out cards. That's why most of you are ending up getting this letter by email! For those in the Milwaukee area, I'll be in town through December 30 (leaving at 6am on the 31st). I hope we can get together or at least chat by phone while I'm here. Love in Christ, --Tim